Vibratory finishing has been used extensively to provide an exterior finish to various articles, particularly machining metal products and metal castings and the like. The part that is being finished is placed in a vibrating vessel partially filled with an abrasive medium. The vibration causes the medium to act on the exterior surface of the article and thus remove undesirable material, such as burrs, flash, and surface refinement for micro inch finishing and the like.
With hollow articles, this presents a different problem. The medium must come into contact with the interior surface of the hollow article in order to be effective. The abrasive material, of course, is relatively fluid, while the vessel is being vibrated. Therefore, the medium will flow around and through openings in objects submersed in the vibrating medium. However, with hollow cylindrical articles, this is not totally effective, particularly with, for example, the housing for the turbine of a jet engine. The housing is a hollow cylindrical article which has numerous holes and passageways around the housing.
Unfortunately, due to the physical configuration of this, and that fact that the holes lie within the wall of the hollow cylindrical article, normal vibrating finishing equipment will not adequately finish these articles. Simply immersing these in a vibrating medium has not proven to be effective.
As a result, these articles are finished by hand. This is particularly expensive, inefficient and creates inherent quality control problems.